“It’ll be fun,” we said.  “It’ll be exciting,” we said.  But we didn’t know what a blind crawl was—yet.

“Lights off.”

Sounds innocent enough.  Right about now, though, the high school seniors I’m with are getting nervous.  Me?  Nah.  I’m the adult.  (Are you snickering?  Yeah, I was too.)

After the guide told us to turn off the lights on our helmets, we sat there in the cold damp and listened as he explained what a “blind crawl” is.  A caver goes on a blind crawl when, for whatever reason, he or she has to get from point A to point B with no light whatsoever –hence, blind (duh).  How far did we have to go?  No idea.  Is it this way, or that way?  No idea.  Oh, one more thing—blind-crawlers aren’t just wandering in the dark, they’re crawling in the dark.

“Now, if you’re crawling,” the guide instructed, “and you get to a place where you can’t fit through, just wiggle a bit to your right or your left and try again.”  I was fine until I got to a place where my glasses scraped the floor as my helmet simultaneously scraped the ceiling.

I managed.  A little anxiously.  A lot sweatily.  It really was great fun and very exciting—when I talked about it later.  Funny, though, how all the fun and excitement vanished entirely in the tight spaces. In the moment, we panic. Before and after, we call it adventure.

You see, dark is one thing.  Black-dark is another altogether.  When you’re afraid of the dark, you still have two things: one is you, the other is the dark.  But when it’s black-dark “you” kind of goes away.  The only thing that exists—really—seems to be the dark.

And that feeling of being hemmed in, of being able to move, but not being able to get through or out?

The bottom line (if you didn’t see it coming) is that caves aren’t the only cramped, black-dark places we can get ourselves into. Very often, we can find ourselves in spots like that both through our own doing and through the doings of others.

I’ve experienced the cramped black-dark twice.  Once, when I was in my forties, single and never-married, I thought I might have to remain single for my whole life. I felt both trapped, unable to “get out” of singleness, and direction-less at the same time.  I felt like I could move, but I couldn’t simply “choose” my way out (this is a matter that requires another’s consent, after all!).  At the very same time, I knew I had at least some choices, but I had no idea where “forward” was.

The second time was when I had cancer twelve years ago. I felt utterly powerless; confined in a place from which I could not escape. I had done nothing to get into that mess; I could do nothing to get out. I could not cure myself or rid myself of the cancer. I had within me something that, if left to itself, would kill me (and might, regardless).

And in this I’m reminded of Psalm 18, in which David writes: “In my distress I called upon the Lord; to my God I cried for help. From his temple he heard my voice, and my cry to him reached his ears” (v. 6). “Distress” here literally means cramped, narrow. Then several verses speak of thunder and lightning and canopies of thick clouds as God rouses himself and comes to David’s rescue.  Then this: “He reached down from on high, he took me; he drew me out of mighty waters…. He brought me out into a broad place; he delivered me, because he delighted in me” (16, 19). Notice God’s deliverance: he takes David from a place of cramped confinement to a broad, open place because he delights in him!

Maybe today you find yourself in the midst of a “blind crawl” of sorts. Sometimes it feels very much like we’re stuck in the black-dark.  We cry out, like the psalmist in several places, “How long, O Lord?” because, as in the blind-crawl, we don’t know how far we are from safety.  And we set out in what seems to be the right direction, the same way we thought we saw the others go, but now there’s no direction (“ahead” is just wherever you go next).

Just this morning I read, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Psalm 119:105).  In the cave, it was sort of a game.  The “rules” said we couldn’t turn on our lights, but what if we panicked and did?  What are they going to do, give us a detention?  But in life, I sometimes thought I knew the way ahead but, since I’d blown it so often before, I had no confidence things would turn out any differently.  Worse than that, I think, are the times when I thought I could see clearly and wound up even farther astray.

Some of the seniors I was with said, “Can I turn on my light—just for one second?  Then I’ll turn it off again.”  We can be like this too.  It’s another version of the foxhole prayer—“Get me out of this, God, and I’ll [fill in the blank].”  We really don’t want anything to do with Point B, we just want to get out of the dark, get our bearings for a minute, and then go right back into our old, dark ways.

Faith, though, doesn’t so much mean we get to walk in blazing sunlight all the days of our lives.  It means believing that however tight, cramped, and confined we may be, there is at least light enough for the path before us, and that in his time, God’s desire is to take those who delight in him into the broad, open place of light, hope, joy and peace.